Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write,Courtesy of the Professoriate

The Wall Street Journal, February
5, 1999

Denis Dutton

Pick up an academic book, and there’s no
reason to expect the writing to be graceful or elegant. Many factors attract
people to the scholarly life, but an appealing prose style was never a
requirement for the job.

Having spent the past 23 years editing a scholarly journal, Philosophy
and Literature, I have come to know many lucid and lively academic
writers. But for every superb stylist there are a hundred whose writing
is no better than adequate — or just plain awful.

While everyone moans (rightly) about the decline in student literacy,
not enough attention has been given to deplorable writing among the professoriate.
Things came to a head, for me, a few years ago when I opened a new book
aptly called The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. It began:

“This book was instigated by the Harvard Core
Curriculum Report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I took to
be an ominous educational reform initiative that, without naming it, would
delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity
of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state’s brutal
conduct of the war in Vietnam and the consequent call for opening the
university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies
of American society for enfranchisement.”

This was written by a professor of English. He’s supposed to teach students
how to write.

Fed up, I resolved to find out just how low the state of academic writing
had sunk. I could use the Internet to solicit the most egregious examples
of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking
world. And so the annual Bad Writing Contest was born.

The rules were simple: Entries should be a sentence or two from an actual
published scholarly book or journal article. No translations into English
allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic: We could hardly admit parodies
in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant.

Each year for four years now the contest has attracted around 70 entries.
My co-editors at Philosophy and Literature and I are the judges,
and the winner is announced in the journal.

No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or
physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics. But
among literature professors who do what they now call “theory” — mostly
inept philosophy applied to literature and culture — jargon has become
the emperor’s clothing of choice.

Thus in A Defense of Poetry, English Prof. Paul Fry writes: “It
is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality
from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading,
the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptuality.”
If readers are baffled by a phrase like “disclosing the absentation of
actuality,” they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of
what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of
natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look
as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen
interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor
showing off.

The vatic tone and phony technicality can also serve to elevate a trivial
subject. Many English departments these days find it hard to fill classes
where students are assigned Milton or Melville, and they are transforming
themselves into departments of so-called cultural studies, where the students
are offered the analysis of movies, television programs, and popular music.
Thus, in a laughably convoluted book on the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding
affair, we read in a typical sentence that “this melodrama parsed the
transgressive hybridity of un-narratived representative bodies back into
recognizable heterovisual modes.”

The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind
of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself “profound”
or “moving” not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing
these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt
painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread
books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity
without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose
always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is this year’s
winning sentence, by Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler, from an article in
the journal Diacritics:

“The move from a structuralist account in which
capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous
ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into
the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one
in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites
and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers
into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a
great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.

As a lifelong student of Kant, I know that philosophy is not always well-written.
But when Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein are most obscure, it’s because
they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems
the human mind can encounter. How different from the desperate incantations
of the Bad Writing Contest winners, who hope to persuade their readers
not by argument but by obscurity that they too are the great minds of
the age.